Saturday, December 26, 2009

Oregon is not Ohio. Neither is Washington.

After finding out that Ohio does indeed have a long pattern of following the nation's political trends, I decided to look at the same data for Oregon.One thing to remember is that the electorate has been realigned many times since 1860 (which is as far back as I am going with these). Prohibition? Steel tarriffs? Vietnam? Female suffrage? The political and social and demographic issues that divide people have changed quite a bit over the years.Which only makes it more important when a state does match up so closely with the nation. Whatever the political or social issue that divided the nation...Ohio somehow managed to feel pretty much the same way about it, since 1860.I can't quite pin down a pattern to Oregon, though. Since 1980, it has been consistently more Democratic than the nation. Before that, it seemed to jump around, in a way that my knowledge of Oregon's demographics don't quite explain.To wit:Although, even with the fact that Oregon lines up less than Ohio does, there are still no major surprises here. While there are clusters of dots in the upper left and lower right quadrants, which represent not voting with the country, those dots are also pretty close to the origin, meaning that even though Oregon swung the other way (giggles), it didn't do so by a lot.Along with that, I wanted to look at two states that would correlate with each other: Oregon and Washington. As expected,Oregon and Washington, going back to 1892, correlate pretty well. The major differences I think come from times when Washington was becoming industrialized, unionized and ethnicized before Oregon was, which gave it different demographics.